Who order’d that their longing’s fire
   Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
   A God, a God their severance ruled;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

758   Requiescat

STREW on her roses, roses,
   And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes:
   Ah! would that I did too.

Her mirth the world required:
   She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
   And now they let her be.

Her life was turning, turning,
   In mazes of heat and sound.
But for peace her soul was yearning,
   And now peace laps her round.

Her cabin’d, ample Spirit,
   It flutter’d and fail’d for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
   The vasty hall of Death.

759   The Scholar-Gipsy

GO, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill;
  Go, Shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes:
   No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
  Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
   Nor the cropp’d grasses shoot another head.
     But when the fields are still,
  And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,
   And only the white sheep are sometimes seen
   Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch’d green;
  Come, Shepherd, and again begin the quest.

Here, where the reaper was at work of late,
  In this high field’s dark corner, where he leaves
   His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruise,
  And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,
   Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use;
     Here will I sit and wait,
  While to my ear from uplands far away
   The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
   With distant cries of reapers in the corn—
  All the live murmur of a summer’s day.

Screen’d is this nook o’er the high, half-reap’d field,
  And here till sundown, Shepherd, will I be.
   Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
  And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
   Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep:
     And air-swept lindens yield
  Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
   Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
   And bower me from the August sun with shade;
  And the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers:

And near me on the grass lies Glanvil’s book—
  Come, let me read the oft-read tale again:
   The story of that Oxford scholar poor,
  Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
   Who, tired of knocking at Preferment’s door,
     One summer morn forsook
  His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy-lore,
   And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood,
   And came, as most men deem’d, to little good,
  But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

But once, years after, in the country lanes,
  Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew,
   Met him, and of his way of life inquired.
  Whereat he answer’d that the Gipsy-crew,
   His mates, had arts to rule as they desired
     The workings of men’s brains;
  And they can bind them to what thoughts they will:
   ‘And I,’ he said, ‘the secret of their art,
   When fully learn’d, will to the world impart:
  But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill!’

This said, he left them, and return’d no more,
  But rumours hung about the country-side,
   That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,
  Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
   In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey,
     The same the Gipsies wore.
  Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;
   At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,
   On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frock’d boors
  Had found him seated at their entering,